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By Kyle Chayka
In one corner of the Rijksmuseum hangs a 17th-century cityscape by Dutch Golden Age painter Gerrit Berckheyde, “View of the Golden Curve at Herengracht,” depicting the structure of Baroque mansions along one of Amsterdam’s main canals. Beautiful double-wide brick buildings line the banks of the Herengracht, with their facades clad in cornices on the surface of the water. Between the new houses are spaces, like holes in a small child’s smile, where there is still vacant land to be developed.
For Dutch architect Koen Olthuis, this painting is a reminder that a large part of his country was built on water. The Netherlands (meaning “low country”) lies in a delta where three major rivers (the Rhine, the Meuse, and the Scheldt) meet the open expanse of the North Sea. More than a quarter of the country is below sea level. For many years, the Dutch struggled to manage their patchwork of flooded lands. Beginning in the 15th century, the country’s windmills were used to pump water from the ground using a hydraulic mechanism called the Archimedean screw. Plots of land were surrounded by high and frequently drained walls, creating areas, which the Dutch call “polders,” dry enough to allow for agriculture or development. The grand houses along Amsterdam’s canals, as iconic to the city as Haussmann architecture is to Paris, were built on thousands of wooden piles sunk in volatile mud. As Olthuis told me recently: “The Netherlands is an absolutely false and synthetic machine. ” The risk of water encroaching on land is so endemic to the Dutch national psyche that he encouraged a mythological predator, the water wolf. In a 1641 poem that coined the name, Dutch poet and playwright Joost van den Vondel suggested the “windmill wings” of wind pumps to “stop this animal. “
Olthuis spent more than two decades searching for tactics to coexist with the wolf. His architecture firm, Waterstudio, specializes in houseboats, but his structures have little to do with the wooden barges that line Dutch canals. Traditional barges were replaced by transport boats; Narrow, low and lacking sufficiently good plumbing, in the post-war era they acquired a reputation as bohemian dwellings, rarely in disrepair. (Utrecht’s former red light district was a row of forty-three barge brothels. ) Waterstudio’s signature allotments, which Olthuis prefers to call “water houses,” look more like trendy condominiums, with glass facades, full-height ceilings and multiple floors. Over the past decade, as severe weather driven by climate change has caused catastrophic flooding everywhere from Tamil Nadu to New England, demand for Waterstudio’s architecture has increased. The company is currently operating floating hotels in Panama and Thailand; six-story floating buildings in Scandinavia; a floating forest in the Persian Gulf, as part of a strategy to combat heat and humidity; and, in their most ambitious commission to date, a floating “city” in the Maldives.
One afternoon in January, I met Olthuis for dinner at the Sea Palace, a Chinese eating spot housed in a three-story pagoda built on the hull of a ship in the harbor near downtown Amsterdam. Created on the basis of a similar design in Hong Kong. , has a capacity for about nine hundred more people and is considered the largest floating restaurant in Europe. At its inauguration in 1984, the ship began to sink and more than a hundred visitors had to evacuate; The manufacturers’ calculations did not take into account the fact that Hong Kongers weigh less on average than the Dutch. In the end, the excessive crowd served up an alfresco dinner on the shore, and as the story goes, a Dutch culture of Chinese takeout was born.
Olthuis is fifty-two years old and lanky, with a short chin and gray hair pulled back in the shaggy-like style typical of Dutch men. He wears everything in black all year round and, much to his wife’s chagrin, even packs black pants for the summer vacation. But his surroundings are less that of a stern aesthete than that of a restless inventor. He drives a plug-in hybrid car that never bothers to charge, eats instant ramen once and twice for breakfast, and has taken a long time to eat. All the land in the space he designed for his family in Delft was covered with AstroTurf so his three children can play football indoors. During our dinner, he drank two Zero Cokes, which enhanced his already abundant aura of activity and thoughtfulness. At the end of the meal, he picked up his chopsticks and held one in his fist, to illustrate the poles that link many Waterstudio buildings to the beds of the bodies of water on which they float.
He put down a chopstick and picked up a plate of kung-pao chicken, which represented the concrete foundations that, counterintuitively, allow many of his houses to float. “Concrete weighs 2. 4 times more than water, so if you make a concrete block, it will sink immediately,” she explained in lightly accented English. “But if you spread it out, if you make a box full of air, it starts to float. ” The poles are anchored 16 feet into the water bed and rise several feet above the surface; The floating concrete base is attached to the posts with rings. Olthuis slowly slid the bowl up and down for the entire duration of the wand to demonstrate how the base can move up and down along the poles with fluctuations in the water. While the Sea Palace is necessarily a glorious barge resting on pontoons in the water, Waterstudio’s concrete bases give its projects a stability similar to that of a construction on land, at least when the waters below are calm. you can compare,” Olthuis said about his buildings and the one we were sitting in.
Through the dining room windows, he looked out at the bustling grocery shopping ground on the floor. “This land could house perhaps a number of floating apartment buildings and affordable student housing,” he said.
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The Dutch government’s strategy for controlling water is primarily defensive. New pumping stations are being built to cope with the increase in water volume caused by climate change. But Harold van Waveren, the most level-headed expert on flood threat control at Rijkswaterstaat, the company that oversees the country’s largest canals, dams and dikes, told me that the threats posed by water have become increasingly unpredictable as sea levels rise and typhoons intensify. “We just finished a study that says ‘At least 3 meters, even five meters, does not deserve to be a challenge in our country,'” he said, referring to the predicted flooding. “On the other hand, will it be more sensible at 3 meters? You never know. “
Olthuis believes that the Netherlands deserves to liberate some areas of land prone to flooding, rather to the elements than to a Sisyphean war against them. He holds the bird’s plate, which now represents one of the country’s polders. The polders, which number more than 3,000, look like a series of bowls, he says. For centuries, the Dutch have made their lands habitable by laboriously keeping the bowls dry. But habitability doesn’t necessarily depend on drought, Olthuis argues; Conversely, construction on water can be safer and more powerful than construction on reclaimed soil. “I think some bowls deserve to be full,” he said, suggesting that land flooding would be little more than the herbal evolution of a man-made system, much like how skyscrapers reshaped cities a century ago. “It’s just an upgrade to the machine. “
Living on the water is an ancient form of ingenuity, driven by necessity. Half a millennium ago, in what is now Peru, the indigenous Uros used reed stubble to build floating islets in Lake Titicaca, probably as a safe haven from the invasion of the Incas. Today, around 1,300 people live on the islands. Tonle Sap, a lake in Cambodia, is home to thousands of people belonging to the country’s persecuted Vietnamese minority, who are barred from owning land. Its fishing villages, adapted to the lake’s stunning seasonal ebbs and flows, come with floating barns, floating karaoke bars, and floating medical clinics. Olthuis has long been interested in what he calls “wet slums,” riverside urban spaces where rudimentary wooden dwellings are built on stilts, as in The sprawling Makoko neighborhood in Lagos. “What we see is that other people don’t adapt to the situation,” he told me. “If they can’t find land, they find a way to build on water. These other people are innovators.
Olthuis likes to say that Waterstudio creates “products, not projects. “The purpose of the company is not to build dazzling and unique structures, but rather to standardize and modernize structures with designs that can be mass-reproduced. One of Olthuis’ favorite projects to date was also the least expensive: a space prototype made of “bamboo and cow dung” in a flood-prone domain of Bihar, one of India’s poorest states. The structure had a metal frame for durability, a design that could only accommodate several families, and a solid on board to protect farm animals in the event of flooding. These undeniable structures are part of Olthuis’ City Apps concept: “instant on-demand solutions” that can be installed in neighborhoods with resources such as classrooms, medical clinics, and electrical installations. He plans to convince cities around the world to install thousands of affordable homes to help alleviate overcrowding and gentrification. “It’s a lifetime of trying to connect the dots toward that future,” he said.
So far, however, most of Waterstudio’s buildings are smaller-scale luxury items, amounting to what Olthuis calls “innovation at the expense of the wealthy. “One morning I visited a floating space that Waterstudio built on the Rhine, near the city. Behind a tall vine-covered fence, a lawn with a brick path leads to a two-story, two-thousand-square-foot space with floor-to-ceiling windows and a long balcony. Of the more than two hundred houseboats that Waterstudio has built in the Netherlands, it commissioned, in 2021, through Erick van Mastrigt, a seventy-one-year-old retired Dutch monetary executive, as a home for himself and his wife.
Van Mastrigt greeted me at the front door, dressed in a casual zip-up sweater and sneakers ensemble. “If you asked me ten years ago, ‘Me on a barge?'” No, I don’t think so. I never had a plan like that,” he said. Van Mastrigt and his wife once lived across the street, in a classic space with a Dutch gabled roof, a filigree façade, and thousand-square-foot garden. In 2016, they bought a spaceship on the river for their adult son to stay in when he visited. But then the son moved to Thailand. Tired of maintaining their giant space and landscaping, the couple decided to scale it down. The old barge was too small, but its location offered them an opportunity: they discovered Waterstudio on the Internet: the cost of the space was around 1. 5 million euros, a figure that Olthuis estimates to be between ten and fifteen percent more than the cost of a similar construction on land. The couple moved in last year and recently sold their old home.
In the hallway of the house, van Mastrigt turned a transfer to open a hatch in the floor, revealing a low-ceilinged, baggage-filled garage area built into the hollow of the concrete foundation. On the floor of the flat, an open-plan kitchen. It adjoins a double-height dining room. On one side of the building was an area, similar to a water walkway, that in the warmer months houses the couple’s motorboat. I looked up and noticed, above the dining room table, a crystal chandelier fixed to a long, thick steel pillar, made less intrusive by a layer of the same dark pink paint that covered the ceiling. If the lamp hung only from a chain, van Mastrigt explained, it would sway at the slightest movement of the water.
The chandelier is just one example of an glaring incongruity between the building’s high-tech functionalism and the couple’s taste in décor. At the end of a hallway, a living room furnished with leather armchairs and paintings of classic Dutch interiors with gold frames. the things we still have here came from the old space,” Mastrigt explained. (There’s even a picture of the space on the bedroom wall. )A small elevator connected to the second floor. From the upstairs balcony, the view of the woefully industrial river: a metal-walled boat rental warehouse, stacks of multicolored shipping pallets, an auto repair shop. Next to him, an old uninhabited spaceship. Like any positive genturizer, van Mastrigt decided to see the merits of his underdeveloped environment. “You don’t have direct neighbors,” he says. You can make a lot of noise. “
Olthuis’s career is a union of his matrilineal and patrilineal family trades. In Dutch, Olthuis means “old house”; On his father’s side, architecture and engineering have been practiced for five generations. In The Hague, the tile mosaics on the facades of several Art Nouveau buildings are named after the architect who designed them: Jan Olthuis, Koen’s great-great-grandfather. On his mother’s side, his family calls him Boot, which means “boat” in Dutch. Olthuis’ maternal grandfather, Jacobus, is the third in a line of Boots who runs a shipyard in the village of Woubrugge. circle of relatives: In the 1950s, Jacobus, who also had a pilot’s license, added ice skates and an airplane wing to a ship and “sailed” the ship over frozen ponds. I asked Olthuis how his parents met, and he seemed surprised. Let’s remember that even this detail of his private history had a water destination detail: him on a cruise in Italy.
However, Olthuis’ path to building on water has been quite winding. The Netherlands is known for its commercial design and Olthuis’ hometown of Son is Eindhoven, the center of the industry. Olthuis’s father worked for Philips, the electronics company, in television engineering, at the time when black-and-white televisions were being replaced by color televisions. Olthuis remembers a time when the family gained a new style of experimental television each month, adding one with a teletext printer that could simply spit sports scores and other information onto the screen on a receipt-like scroll. As a child, staying with his grandparents, Olthuis spent hours in Jacobus’ workshop, building boats, cars and helicopters. At the age of thirteen, he began helping a friend who repaired motorcycles that they drove on country roads before they were old enough to legally ride them. He worked for a time in a Michelin-starred restaurant in Eindhoven, washing dishes and parking cars, and thought about a career in hospitality. But when her friend at the time decided to study architecture at Delft University of Technology, he followed her there and enrolled in the same program.
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Olthuis’ years of research in the early 1990s coincided with the rise of “starchitects,” prominent developers around the world who imbued their projects with dramatic aesthetic signatures. Rem Koolhaas, a fellow Dutchman who discovered the Office of Metropolitan Architecture, has become known for his conceptual rigor and ambitious cantilevered designs, adding the wave-shaped Nexus World Housing in Fukuoka, and the Maison à Bordeaux in Los Angeles, a staff in France that has been supplied with a giant angel-shaped elevator to transport its wheelchair-bound owner between floors. Olthuis told me that he found the star architectural technique to be unattractive, driven by ego. “They are more focused on building a statue for themselves than for society,” he said. However, at a university lecture, he discovers that he works as a chauffeur for prominent Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind, and the two strike up a relationship. Libeskind made a comic strip for Olthuis that he has kept to this day, depicting a windmill in a Los Angeles landscape they passed through. (A fan of numerology, Libeskind also estimates that Olthuis’s career would peak in 2031. “I still have time,” Olthuis joked. ) Olthuis admired Libeskind’s experimental and social spirit with which he imbued projects like the Jewish . Museum in Berlin. “He taught me that architecture can be much more than just buildings,” Olthuis said.
After graduating, Olthuis found a job at a giant architecture firm run by one of his former professors. For his first project, a traffic control center in Wolfheze, he first flirted with architecture on the water, designing a design that would stand on a “There wasn’t much spirit among young architects to replace the world,” he said. Rolf Peters, an engineering student at Delft University in Technology, was applying for a company competing at a festival to design a master plan for IJburg, a new district of Amsterdam built on synthetic islands emerging from Lake IJmeer. Olthuis joined the team and his request was unsuccessful, he and Peters decided to paint together to design homes for the neighborhood.
The winning plan designated plots for the barges, but did not include any specification on the types of structures that would occupy them. In the Netherlands, a spaceship is sold with the rights to its location in the water, just as a classic spacecraft is sold legally. Stuck to the earth on which it sits. For decades, spaceships have littered the canals of Amsterdam’s city center. “When you walk past them, your head hits the ceiling, it’s wet, it’s low, it’s unstable,” Olthiris said. “But they were located in the most productive places, so we thought, maybe because of the enthusiasm of the young people, that we could do better. “They also saw it as a business opportunity. On earth, many young architects competed to build in a limited space. On the water, Olthuis says, they would be “the one-eyed king in the land of the blind. “Waterstudio presented it from Peters’ home in Haarlem in 2003.
The company’s first breakthrough came the following year, designing a glass-walled barge for a wealthy tulip-trading family. Called Watervilla Aalsmeer, the space would be anchored across a lake, near the warehouses where flower auctions take place. According to the construction standards of the time, the length of the new design had to match that of the classic single-story spaceship it replaced. But Olthuis and Peters discovered that there were no restrictions on underwater construction. Its design was more than two thousand square feet long and incorporated eye-catching elements like cabinets that descended into the concrete base at the touch of a button, like weapons caches in a super’s lair. -Naughty and a windowless underwater movie house with capacity for another twenty people. The construction has become a local media sensation. “We had six or seven film crews in one space,” Olthuis recalls. A television segment showed Olthuis, then clean-shaven and in his early 30s, sitting on a plush white couch in the living room. He remembers telling other people at the time, in retrospect, overly optimistically: “In 2010 we will see floating cities all over the world. »
For spaces in IJburg, the city of Amsterdam, developers deserve to abide by housing codes rather than shipbuilding codes. Floating buildings deserve good insulation and sewage systems connected to urban infrastructure; They would also be allowed to rise two stories above the water. Potential citizens can simply enter a drawing to acquire water parcels in the neighborhood. In 2008, Waterstudio became the first company to set up a floating space in IJburg. The design, which is still moored in its original location, is 3 stories high, with rooms built into the foundation. When he was first lowered into the water, he sank ten inches deeper than the regulations allowed. (The owner later won a lawsuit against one of the contractors for making the design heavier than it was designed for. ) The team solved the challenge by creating inflatable jetties, filled with air and water. water, which formed a walkway around the construction and lifted the construction. he saves Olthuis told me: “From then on, we will be able to use these systems in all our projects. »
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Waterstudio’s IJburg House served as the style for a new generation of water houses in the Netherlands. Today there are more than twenty floating communities throughout the country. IJburg’s houses are arranged in a grid that resembles miniature city blocks, with narrow docks instead of sidewalks. At night, the houses shine like lanterns on the dark water. Buying in the community turned out to be a successful investment: the houses were built for about 300,000 euros each and now sell for several times more. While I was in Amsterdam, I rented a room at a B. and B. in IJburg called La Corte Sconta, run by a brother and sister from another spa city, Venice. The rental rooms are located on the 3-level ground floor, below an open kitchen and a cozy, green space with giant sliding windows overlooking the water. When I went down the stairs and entered my room, at the end of a short hallway, I noticed that the windows were small and high on the wall, as if they were in an English basement. Looking out, I saw that the surface of The Lake rose to the back of the window, which meant that the ground was about six feet under water. One of the brothers, Auro Cavalcante, who lives in the most sensitive terrain, told me that he only feels the movement of the construction when there is a storm. That night the weather was clear, but I felt a slight wobble, or perhaps just psychosomatic sea legs, as I looked at the lake around me, pushing in all directions.
Today, Waterstudio’s headquarters are located in a former grocery store on a quiet residential street in Rijswijk, a small suburb halfway between The Hague and Delft. Olthuis lives ten minutes away, in a new community built on a railway junction in Delft’s city center. Contrary to his ideal of modest water-related designs, he told me he would move his family to a houseboat only if he could get a piece of water big enough to house a garden. (When I asked his wife, Charlotte, a chef, if she was willing to live on the water, she replied, “I’d like to, but maybe only during summer vacation. “The company’s offices, perfectly visible through their gigantic front windows, are small and open. “The street and the construction are almost one,” he said.
Inside, a row of steel shelves running the length of the area was filled with 3D-printed models of projects ranging from already built to completely theoretical: a floating hotel with a glass roof to allow for the northern lights; a slender tower resembling a dizzying stack of plates, designed as a synthetic aquatic habitat for plants and animals; a “seapod” mounted, like a lollipop, on a single mast that sticks out of the water, with a space inside. Olthuis encourages a technique of improvisation in designs and materials. He had recently discovered that a recycling company was being paid to dispose of worn-out wind turbine blades, which sometimes ended up buried in landfills. He and a Korean consumer were discussing the option of reusing the hollow pieces of fiberglass as foundations for floating walkways or, perhaps, as individual hotel rooms, with windows cut into the sides. The blades would offer “an architecture that we might never have achieved if we had to pay for it,” Olthuis said. This ingenuity extends to the use of new technologies. At a desk, Anna Vendemia, an Italian who has worked at Waterstudio since 2018, sat in front of two monitors and used the synthetic intelligence tool Midjourney to generate renderings of a floating, shell-shaped hotel suite with curved glass windows. and a swimming pool on board, for a consumer in Dubai.
A little further afield, Sridhar Subramani, who joined the company from Mumbai seven years ago, was conducting a commissioned study in the city of Rotterdam. Rotterdam, home to Europe’s largest port, is situated on the Nieuwe Waterweg, a wide canal that runs through the mouth of the Rhône River into the North Sea. This position makes Rotterdam vulnerable to flooding, and the local government has invested heavily in adaptive design. In 2019, a solar-powered floating dairy farm with a cheese factory at Drop Point opened in the city. The study by Waterstudio aimed to show how a theoretical fleet of cellular floating structures could simply replace locations during the day to fit the routines of city dwellers. Initially, platform bureaucracy represented restaurants that could simply float into downtown workplace constructions at lunchtime and then move into residential neighborhoods at night. On Subramani’s computer screen, small construction icons migrated around the Nieuwe Maas River in central Rotterdam like a swarm of employed bees.
Subramani has a bachelor’s degree in architecture but describes himself as an “urban researcher and technologist. “Olthuis told me later, “Sridhar is crazier than I am. “When Olthuis interviewed him for a job and asked him why he wanted to construct floating buildings, Subramani replied that his true purpose was to create cities that floated in the air, using helium balloons. Rolf Peters, co-founder of Waterstudio, left in 2010 to pursue independent projects. For the past decade, Olthuis’ wife at the company has been Ankie Stam, a forty-four-year-old architect who handles the administrative and marketing facets of the company. “We attract other people who aren’t the same old architecture students,” Stam told me as he prepared a plate of black bread. , Nutella and slices of Gouda. ” We don’t need to build a really great building. “
Scattered around the office, like loose Lego bricks, were small 3D-printed models of houses in the Maldives’ floating city. On a table, Olthuis unrolled a huge sheet of glossy printer paper. It was an aerial representation of the finished task: a network of mosaic platforms, like a synthetic spider web, with rows of pastel-colored terraced houses. With an estimated cost of $1 billion, the task will be located fifteen minutes by boat from the busy capital of Malé. The hotel will offer up to 13,000 homes, resting in a shallow lagoon surrounded by reinforced sandbars and coral reefs designed to break the waves.
For the Maldives, an archipelago country in the Indian Ocean, climate change is already an existential threat. According to geological studies, 80% of the country could be uninhabitable by 2050. The floating city concept was born after the president of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, decided on an underwater cabinet assembly in diving equipment in 2009 to raise awareness about the potential effects of climate change in the country. The Dutch consulate in the Maldives, building the Netherlands’ foreign reputation in water control technology, connected Nasheed with Waterstudio. In the Maldives, we can’t avoid the waves, but we can sail with them,” Nasheed said of the project. But he resigned in 2012 and since then, Waterstudio has had to navigate four other Maldivian administrations, each of which persuaded them. of the importance of the project. ” It’s a kind of education,” Olthiris said. You have to start from scratch. “
A first batch of four homes for the city was recently towed to the ocean, and Olthuis estimates the structure will be completed by 2028. “Maybe it’s faster,” he said, adding that because the homes are modular, factories can worry about producing them right away. But previous projects were delayed due to zoning issues, faltering developers and poor local infrastructure. In 2016, the Times reported that Waterstudio’s ambitious projects in New Jersey and Dubai were set to roll out their first sets within a year. Eight years later, Olthuis described either as still waiting for the structure. Waterstudio produced fifteen design iterations for the New Jersey project. “This activity is different than building on a piece of land,” he said. “You have to be very, very patient. “
Other corporations have followed Waterstudio into floating real estate. Most of the project in the Maldives is funded through Dutch Docklands, an advertising developer focused on floating structures, which will complement the homes with its own luxury hotels and houseboats. (Olthuis is a minor shareholder in the company. ) In 2021, Oceanix, a New York-based company, and BIG, a company owned by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, announced plans to build a floating progression off the coast of Busan in the south of the country. . Oceanix has touted the task as “a pioneer in a new industry” and industry blogs have announced an estimated touch-off date of 2025, but for now, the structure has yet to begin. (Oceanix co-founder and CEO Itai Madamombe said the task will likely not begin until later this year. )
Olthuis told me that, as festivals from other, larger corporations intensified, Waterstudio had to engage in a “small battle” for new jobs. “Our credit is that we have twenty years of experience,” he said, “so we know the tricks and messes a little better, and that will keep us ahead of the rest for the next 3 to five years. “According to him, any focus on floating architecture is a smart thing to do, as long as corporations can deliver on their dazzling promises. “There are many projects and each of them has to be successful,” he said.
The most devastating natural crisis in the modern history of the Netherlands was the North Sea flood of 1953. Known as Watersnoodramp, it is the result of an intense windstorm over the ocean that gathered the spring high tides. Residents of the north of the country were awakened mid-afternoon on Feb. 1 by a first deluge that flooded densely populated islands and filled carefully manicured polders. Railroad tracks were flooded and telephone poles were destroyed, cutting off communication with the area. The official alert did not succeed among citizens until eight o’clock in the morning, with many trapped in their attics or on their rooftops. ” It’s like we’re spectators at the end of the world,” recalls a witness from the village of Kruiningen. The next day, at four o’clock in the afternoon, another wave of water arrived, even higher than the first, and destroyed many of the structures that were still standing. Some survivors waited for days for large ships to arrive in the area. In total, about 2,000 more people died.
The crisis forced the Dutch government to grapple with the inadequacy of its old dike system. Just weeks after the flood, a committee was formed to expand a national water defense plan, known as Delta Works, involving more than 20,000 miles of new levees. dikes and dams. Its central element, completed in 1998, is the Maeslantkering, a metal typhoon barrier that separates the Nieuwe Waterweg from the North Sea.
One afternoon, Olthuis took me through the countryside to Maeslantkering. Outside of Dutch urban centers, the artificiality of the landscape becomes harder to ignore. Roads were the focus of topography; From the passenger window of the car, I can see the agricultural fields below, dotted with puddles from recent storms. Small channels cut through the rugged terrain in straight lines. The land rises as we head towards the coast: the ledge of a giant bowl of kung pao bird, which created the feeling of hunting to see the surface of the sea. Many of the canals that ran through farmland were fortified by low, grassy hills. “It takes almost nothing to break down those barriers,” Olthuis said of the barriers. “Don’t communicate with the terrorists, because if you need to destroy this country, you just have to break some dikes and then the whole formula collapses. Amsterdam will be flooded. “
The Nieuwe Waterweg was full of commercial ships and oil rigs heading out to sea. Wind turbines covered both banks. Olthuis parked in a parking lot overlooking Maeslantkering, which architecture critic Michael Kimmelman called “one of the lesser-known wonders of fashionable Europe. “One of the largest cellular structures ever built, it is composed of two same white metal frames, each weighing about seven thousand tons, located on opposite banks of the canal. A computer formula tracks the levels of the Nieuwe Waterweg; If the water rises too high, the formula kicks in and the two frames rotate from one shore to the other, wearing away sections of curved metal wall that meet in the middle and seal the channel from the sea swell.
Olthuis and I walked toward a metal fence covered with caution signs. The nearest component of the metal frames was a dozen meters away. Their design deserves comparisons to the Eiffel Tower (they’re only slightly shorter), but to me, they looked more like a side roller coaster. Standing next to them, I felt an intoxicating and slightly unsettling emotion.
Maeslantkering is designed to deal with the types of typhoons that are only expected to occur once every ten thousand years. So far, outside of testing, it has only been activated once, in December last year, during Typhoon Pia. But Harold van Waveren, a flood control expert at the Rijkswaterstaat, told me that if severe typhoons become more frequent and the Maeslantkering remains closed for too long, river water that would otherwise flow into the sea would have no outlet and could still flood the region. “We want a total diversity of solutions, from the smallest scale to the most gigantic,” he said. The country has taken steps to build more water capacity, as Olthuis envisions. The project called Space for the River, completed between 2006 and 2021, deepened and widened stretches of rivers in thirty places and replaced some synthetic banks with stretches of wetland landscapes. Still, van Waveren seemed skeptical that floating architecture was the future. “I don’t know if it’s imaginable on a giant scale,” he said.
Jeroen Aerts, director of the Water and Climate Risks Department at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and one of the country’s leading environmental researchers, was even more skeptical. “Will there be giant floating cities? To be honest, I don’t think that’s going to happen,” he stated. Living on the water “is not part of Dutch culture,” he continued. “On average, a Dutch user wants to have a lawn and needs two floors. ” Olthuis somewhat agrees. The biggest obstacles to a giant-scale water structure are not technological or financial, he said, but rather behavioral. NIMBYism may arise when the Dutch are asked to believe in a wetter way of life. “They like it, but not in their backyard,” Olthuis said. “If you ask them if their lawn wants to be watered, they say no. »He spoke with frustration of the slowness of the Dutch bureaucracy and its reluctance to adjust its defensive posture against the Water Wolf. The country is “stuck on engineering responses that we’ve already been employing for fifty years,” he said. They will have to be created urgently, “but politicians are not prepared. ” We had climbed a hill to get a better view of the canal. Ships continually crossed the open Maeslantkering. The Netherlands’ familiarity with flooding has created paradoxical obstacles to floating structures, Olthuis said: “If your country is threatened by water, its legal framework does not allow you to come close to it. » Fragmented ownership of floating structures does not is permitted in the Netherlands, discouraging developers who would possibly need to build and sell collective housing. In addition, Dutch water plots sold for houses remain limited in size, preventing the structure of taller floating buildings, such as Waterstudio components in Scandinavia. “The city wants to “Rezone that water and then allow it to build parcels that are between a hundred and a hundred feet,” he said. “We drew the plans several times. We are still waiting for approval from the right town or village.
To see Waterstudio’s most ambitious finished project, I had to leave the Netherlands, to the French city of Lyon. The Théâtre L’Île Ô floats on the Rhône along a cobbled promenade along the water’s edge, near the Gallieni Bridge. “O” is a homophone for water, the French word for “water. “)On a winter’s afternoon, the multi-lane roads over the banks were filled with cars, but compared to the bustling Dutch rivers, the water of the Rhône was calm. The theatre is made up of six susceptible polygons made of white metal and pierced by irregularly shaped windows. Connected to the shore via 3 walkways, it juts out of the river like iceberg fragments.
The building, which opened to the public in early 2023, is the second location of Patadôme, a local organization that organizes children’s shows. But Olthuis described the theater, more nobly, as a “global, cellular good,” a public infrastructure that, if no longer sought after in Lyon, can simply be towed down the Rhône and moored in Avignon, perhaps, or in Marseilles. Its current lease is eighteen years and its modular design makes it adaptable to other uses. David Lahille, Director of Patadôme Business Development, oversaw the project for the structure. “Today it’s a theater,” he told me. Tomorrow, if we need to turn it into a school, it will be easy. “
The concept of the new theatre was born in 2018, when Lyon’s canals were transferred to the French federal government and the city presented an initiative to renovate the promenade. At the time, Patadôme was looking to build a new space, but the structure of the circulation of terrestrial theatres is still strictly regulated in France, due to an old monarchical precedent dating back to Louis XIV. An overwater theater would be an exception to this rule. “We have the idea of buying a room and modifying it,” Laille said. They discovered Waterstudio, which proposed an ambitious new structure designed from scratch.
Lahille, a cheerful Frenchman with an engineering background, recalls that at the team’s first assembly at Waterstudio’s offices, Olthuis pulled out a box of wooden blocks, knocked them down on a table, and asked clients to build a style of the riverscape. He asked them to improvise a form for the theatre using the same blocks, which in the end encouraged geometric and whimsical design. “You’re a kid looking to imagine,” Laille said. However, passing the task required bureaucratic wrangling at the venue. and national titles and was finally based on the enthusiasm of a single civil servant, Jean-Bastien Gambonnet, who was promoted in 2021 to head of the local river navigation unit within the French Ministry of Ecological Transition. Gambonnet strove to obtain Lyon’s approval. and Paris. The procedure took about a year. “Here in France, in general, it’s been going on for more than a decade,” Lachille said.
The concrete foundations of the theatre were laid 8 kilometres from the city. As the bridges over the Rhône were unusually low, the maximum sensitive land had to be built for construction on the site. When the floating platform was ready to be launched, doubts arose as to whether the riverbank was strong enough to support the w8 (fifteen hundred tons in total), so the contractors rushed to reach the shore in record time, weeks, employing twenty-meter-long metal piles. (Gambonet told them, he would sort out the documents after the fact. ) “I said to the owner of the port, ‘Now you have one of the sturdiest docks in France,'” Lalille said.
Upon entering the theater’s lobby, the visitor is surrounded from floor to ceiling by exposed pale beams made of cross-laminated timber, a lightweight wood. When I visited the area, I had just seen a juvenile production of “Animal Farm. “It came out of the giant of two theaters, a cavernous stadium-like auditorium with a capacity of two hundred and forty-four seats. Long strips of bamboo created wavy patterns on the walls and ceiling, either for acoustics or to evoke the aquatic environment. Confetti strewn across the floor and young people crowded the level to inspect a wooden barn. The windowless area seemed too gigantic to be compatible with the building he had entered and, in a sense, from the outside, a third of the theater’s height. It’s hidden under the river. ” You’re underwater right now,” one of the levelers told me. He said that perhaps he would only run into the ship’s motion when, from time to time, a giant ship passed overhead. velocity.
When the theatre opened, some locals complained that its trendy design contrasted with the city’s neoclassical stone architecture. Very ugly,” one of them wrote in the comments segment of a news article about the project. Pretentious, both in substance and form,” writes another. Jean-Philippe Amy, director of the Théâtre L’Île Ô, tells me, “Lyon is a classic city,” but adds that the area has a way of converting visitors, especially young people, who are Patadôme’s target. public. Children can look out the windows and see the passage at eye level. On sunny days, reflections from the undulating surface of the river dance on the building’s façade.
Last December, the French Alps experienced a week of heavy rain. The Rhône, which carries glacial meltwater from the mountains, has swollen due to excessive rainfall. In the center of Lyon, where the Rhône meets the Saone, what exists is strengthened. On the night of December 12, flooding was predicted, but the Théâtre L’Île Ô went ahead with an event scheduled by the city’s Irish consulate. The water arrived earlier and with more force than expected. To access the construction, visitors had to cross an improvised wooden bridge placed over one of the walkways. From the first floor windows they saw the Rhône passing by. “We may see those trees evolve very temporally with the existing ones,” Lahille recalls. He kept an eye on his phone, tracking the height of the river, but when the land began to flood, the crowd in the theater’s underwater auditorium remained bone dry. When Lahille left at one in the morning, the water on the banks was up to his knees. From the mainland, the theater seemed elevated, suspended over the swollen river. “The building has survived, like a ship,” Lahille said. “It’s going up and down, and it’s not a challenge. The only challenge is quitting. ♦
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